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South Carolina

Between 2008 and 2012, institutions and individuals in South Carolina received $7.1 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Humanities Council of South Carolina for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage.

Below are some examples.

A unique collection of a thousand documents cataloguing the lives of two generations of South Carolina women, Eliza Lucas Pinckney and her daughter Harriet Pinckney Horry, between 1739 and 1830 has been digitized, annotated, and archived at the University of South Carolina with the help of two grants totaling $324,000.

The content-rich websites of historical societies and libraries may present numerous challenges to the visually disabled. With two grants totaling $74,000, the University of South Carolina is developing tools to help visually impaired users access humanities collections online.

When two million African Americans migrated from the South to the North in the early twentieth century, they profoundly altered American society. With the help of a $75,000 grant, fifty middle school and high-school teachers from South Carolina studied this historical event through the art of Jacob Lawrence and other primary sources at two-day conferences hosted by the Sumter County Cultural Commission.

One hundred thousand pages of historic newspapers such as the Columbia Phoenix and the Charleston Daily News from 1860 to 1922 are being digitized by the University of South Carolina with the support of $676,000 in grants. This work is part of Chronicling America, which NEH is conducting with the Library of Congress.

Sixty thousand people came to the Union Course near New York City in 1823 to watch Eclipse and Harry in the greatest horse race of the nineteenth century. Paul E. Johnson of the University of South Carolina, with the help of a $40,000 research grant, researched the showdown as the basis for a book on southern-northern rivalry in the early years of the republic.

The South Carolina Encyclopedia, a joint effort of the Humanities Council of South Carolina, the University of South Carolina’s Institute for Southern Studies, and the University of South Carolina Press, tells the state’s history. After selling more than 18,000 copies, the project has now yielded a series of e-books.

Six medical centers have hosted Literature and Medicine, a reading and discussion program of the Humanities Council of South Carolina, which is led by humanities scholars and uses notable books to help medical professionals better understand their patients and their own reactions to suffering.

Political debate in the 1970s over the Equal Rights Amendment culminated in the International Women’s Year conferences, which helped shape positions on women’s roles in American society. A book about the period and the conferences is being written by Marjorie Spruill, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, with the help of a $50,400 fellowship.